Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar
This paper explores the verbal system and more particularly the perfective aspect of the Pulaar language, which belongs to the Niger-Congo / North-Atlantic language family. In Pulaar, tense, aspect, negation, and voice are all encoded through verbal affixation. I show in this paper that the perfecti...
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2023
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ftcdlib:oai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9889m4wv 2024-09-15T18:23:35+00:00 Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar Kane, Samba 2023-06-01 application/pdf https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/content/qt9889m4wv/qt9889m4wv.pdf unknown eScholarship, University of California qt9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/content/qt9889m4wv/qt9889m4wv.pdf public Linguistics Pulaar language Niger-Congo article 2023 ftcdlib 2024-06-28T06:28:19Z This paper explores the verbal system and more particularly the perfective aspect of the Pulaar language, which belongs to the Niger-Congo / North-Atlantic language family. In Pulaar, tense, aspect, negation, and voice are all encoded through verbal affixation. I show in this paper that the perfective aspect while informing about the completion of an event also encodes tense information. In the absence of an overt tense marker, I argue for a null tense head that carries a recent past tense feature. Considering the Fixed and Universal Hierarchy of Functional Heads Hypothesis (Cinque 1999) and the Mirror Principle (Baker 1985), I argue for verb movement using evidence from adverb adjunction and from the order of affixation of the perfective -ii, negation -aa and distant past -no morphemes. Moreover, I consider for comparative purposes the imperfective aspect and two varieties of Pulaar (Fuuta and Toore), highlighting differences concerning allomorphy and ordering of the perfective marker -ii. Following Alexiadou et al. (2015), I end with a brief discussion of voice and suggest that Pulaar provides evidence for an expletive voice head -ma that appears in middle/passive voice and anti-causative contexts, which supports the idea that voice alternation is responsible for the causative/anti-causative verbal variation found cross-linguistically. Article in Journal/Newspaper North Atlantic University of California: eScholarship |
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University of California: eScholarship |
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Linguistics Pulaar language Niger-Congo |
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Linguistics Pulaar language Niger-Congo Kane, Samba Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
topic_facet |
Linguistics Pulaar language Niger-Congo |
description |
This paper explores the verbal system and more particularly the perfective aspect of the Pulaar language, which belongs to the Niger-Congo / North-Atlantic language family. In Pulaar, tense, aspect, negation, and voice are all encoded through verbal affixation. I show in this paper that the perfective aspect while informing about the completion of an event also encodes tense information. In the absence of an overt tense marker, I argue for a null tense head that carries a recent past tense feature. Considering the Fixed and Universal Hierarchy of Functional Heads Hypothesis (Cinque 1999) and the Mirror Principle (Baker 1985), I argue for verb movement using evidence from adverb adjunction and from the order of affixation of the perfective -ii, negation -aa and distant past -no morphemes. Moreover, I consider for comparative purposes the imperfective aspect and two varieties of Pulaar (Fuuta and Toore), highlighting differences concerning allomorphy and ordering of the perfective marker -ii. Following Alexiadou et al. (2015), I end with a brief discussion of voice and suggest that Pulaar provides evidence for an expletive voice head -ma that appears in middle/passive voice and anti-causative contexts, which supports the idea that voice alternation is responsible for the causative/anti-causative verbal variation found cross-linguistically. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Kane, Samba |
author_facet |
Kane, Samba |
author_sort |
Kane, Samba |
title |
Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
title_short |
Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
title_full |
Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
title_fullStr |
Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
title_full_unstemmed |
Perfective Aspect and Order of Affixation in Pulaar |
title_sort |
perfective aspect and order of affixation in pulaar |
publisher |
eScholarship, University of California |
publishDate |
2023 |
url |
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/content/qt9889m4wv/qt9889m4wv.pdf |
genre |
North Atlantic |
genre_facet |
North Atlantic |
op_relation |
qt9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9889m4wv https://escholarship.org/content/qt9889m4wv/qt9889m4wv.pdf |
op_rights |
public |
_version_ |
1810463822831419392 |